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In 2014, Aurora Orchestra did something that had never been done at the Proms before. We played Mozart’s 40th symphony – that has been done, many times – but from memory.
It was terrifying. Orchestral musicians usually start getting out their instruments 10 minutes before they go on stage, but people started warming up nearly an hour before – endless repetitions of fragments of music as players tested what they thought they might forget. We didn’t know if we would get on stage and freeze or fall off. Thankfully, we did neither and fear turned into excitement. Our bassoonist Amy Harman described the feeling as “like skydiving without a parachute. But in a good way.”
Even so, if someone had told me then that 12 years later we would be performing from memory Mahler’s First Symphony – a piece almost twice as long as the Mozart that uses more than double the number of musicians – I would have been surprised. And if I’d then been told that in the first half of the concert we’d be presenting a new play about Mahler, featuring choreography involving the entire orchestra alongside two actors and a complicated sound design (and written by me!), I’d have laughed. But this weekend we will do exactly this.
After the Mozart, our performances from memory became a regular Proms feature. Then, three years ago, we upped the ante when we took on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Memorising that enormously complex work was a challenge, but what felt especially scary was the fact we were dedicating the concert to a single piece. The second half would feature the performance; the first would introduce the work to the audience … somehow. It was my job to figure out what this actually meant – and it took a really long time.
What emerged was a 40-minute first half that told the story of how the Rite was written and premiered, combining text, musical analysis, orchestral excerpts, choreography for the whole orchestra and video projection, and featuring performances by the actors Charlotte Ritchie and Karl Queensborough.
It felt as if we had hit on something, so we have continued in this vein. At the following year’s Proms, we presented a first half dedicated to the creation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony before performing the work itself; last year, we turned to Shostakovich’s Fifth.
It’s hard to know what to call these first halves. We used to use the word “presentation”, but it has become more than that. “Play” or “orchestral theatre” feel closer, but all suggestions are welcome.
Our choice of repertoire tends to be as simple as what would be fun to perform from memory and which pieces have an interesting story to explore. The first question is especially important, as we are asking players to spend hours and hours with this music. Everyone will have their own process of memorising – some go for runs with the music on headphones, some play it over and over – and some get out highlighter pens.
My own creative process always begins with reading. I’ll know the music from playing it (I’m the Aurora’s principal flautist), but I’ll want to learn more about the composer and the historical context. It’s always the words that come directly from the composers and their contemporaries that tell me what we should do.
When I researched The Rite of Spring, I was struck by the many collaborative voices clamouring to give their accounts of how they created the premiere production. For Beethoven’s Ninth, I read the composer’s conversation books: notebooks in which he asked friends to write down what they were saying, as an aide for his profound hearing loss, and realised we didn’t need any other words. With Shostakovich’s Fifth, I realised how few words exist from the composer himself – however much I read, he remained elusive.
I work closely with our conductor, Nicholas Collon, to untangle the score and decide which passages to focus on and how to present the music in a way that shows physically what the score is doing. James Bonas co-directs – we often refer to him as our “bad audience member”, as he tells us what is working, what is not and what is too academic or music-jargony. I used to find this part of the process excruciating, but I’ve learned to enjoy it.
I love the fact that every year I get to be completely immersed in a different composer’s world and music. This year has all been about Mahler. The first time I performed his music as a student flautist, I felt as if I had stepped inside a world I didn’t quite understand, but which was oddly familiar. I remember clinging on to the other more experienced instrumentalists and their phrasing and timing. Everything seemed exaggerated. Every melody carried so much emotion, with dynamics lurching from the quietest, highest held chord to the loudest eruption of the full orchestra. Daunting stuff when you’re just starting out, but also the adrenaline high orchestral players live for.
Mahler, in stark contrast to Shostakovich, left us many words, and they reveal an artist constantly analysing his own feelings and emotions.
… for as long as I can remember – my need to express myself musically begins at the point where the dark feelings hold sway, at the door which leads to the other world – the world in which things are no longer separated by time and space … For those that listen closely, everything about me is explained in my music.
This is particularly the case with his First Symphony, into which he poured his lived experience: memories of soldiers in the forests of his childhood home, the sound of cuckoos outside his composing room, songs about problematic love affairs and children’s nursery rhymes.
Little surprise, then, that when Mahler presented his First Symphony to the world, in Budapest in 1889, he felt as if he was baring his soul. But audiences were baffled. Reviewers described the music as “offensively trivial”, “a disaster” and “ridiculous”. In the months that followed, his friends described him as looking sick and feeling misunderstood. “For goodness sake, where do people put their ears and their hearts if they can’t understand this music?” he said.
I began wondering what Mahler might have thought of Sigmund Freud and the groundbreaking work he was doing around this same time. I was fascinated to learn that the two had met: the composer made an appointment to talk to Freud in 1910. The accounts of their meeting tell us that they discussed exactly these ideas, why he felt he needed to write particular kinds of music and why he felt the public couldn’t understand him. I began to wonder if this meeting could become a framework through which to explore the symphony.
And so my script follows Mahler’s journey, from conceiving and composing the symphony to premiering it to widespread bewilderment and then trying to get people to understand it.
The programme notes he provided for the second performance read hilariously like someone overexplaining themselves. I love his attempts to describe his third movement, with which people had a particular problem:
I want you to imagine The Hunter’s Funeral Procession, a picture from an old book of children’s fairytales: in this picture – the beasts of the forest accompany the dead woodsman’s coffin to the grave, with hares carrying a small banner, with a band of Bohemian musicians in front, and the procession escorted by music-making cats, toads, crows etc …
There’s plenty more. We have a script and we have a brilliant singer (Natalie Lewis) and two wonderful actors (Jack Bardoe and Sarah Twomey) who have been rehearsing with me, James and Nicholas this past week. But the orchestra will have only a day and a half to rehearse the first half, in which they are required to remember terribly confusing versions of bits of the symphony and lots of strictly choreographed moves around the stage.
The only way this works is if we have a military plan mapped out. We call this flat-packing. The players need to trust us – which has taken time, I admit. Each year, I do wonder: perhaps this will be the year where we’ve pushed them too far? That thought is certainly in my head this week.
You might ask: “Why bother?” For me, there are two main reasons. First, I am so aware of how lucky I am to have the best seat in the house at orchestral concerts. Flutes sit right in the middle of the orchestra and I can hear all the conversations between instruments and the shifting textures surrounding me. The aural experience is visceral and immersive. I want to find ways to give audiences the same breathtaking experience I have.
Second, I am in a very small minority of people who have spent a lot of time studying music: at university, then music college, then for 20 years as a professional musician. Yet I still don’t feel I know much. Whenever a conductor or colleague talks to me about how a bit of a score works, or breaks apart a texture, or gives some historical context, it always enhances my understanding of the music and makes me listen more closely.
Our plays are about giving audiences ways to feel closer to the music. Someone once described it to me as “giving the keys to the kingdom”, which I love. You may listen to the music differently because you know more about the composer, or the social context, or because you’ve seen musical textures brought to life; the players choreographed across the stage reflect this. We want to communicate the music to everyone, whether this is your first orchestral concert or you know and love the work. Come and see if we’ve got it right at the Royal Albert Hall in London – or listen to it on the radio – this Saturday and Sunday.
English (US) ·